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We recently acquired the young mare One That Got Away carrying her first foal, with the express intent of breeding her back to the most-promising young Maryland stallion in Blofeld, and we think she is great fit for him for a few reasons.
First and most importantly, One That Got Away is a half-sister to the multiple stakes winner and $336k earner Great Soul and to the stakes winner and six-figure earner Valued Notion, both by Great Notion. Great Notion, of course, has been the leading sire in Maryland for several years — but he also happens to be a son of Elusive Quality, who is also the sire of Blofeld’s own sire, Quality Road. Both Blofeld and Great Notion were also precocious dirt milers, and we believe it’s only a matter of time before Blofeld supplants Great Notion atop the Maryland sire list (especially after he covered about 175 mares over the last two breeding seasons).
In addition to those two Great Notion half-siblings, One That Got Away’s dam is a half to another multiple sakes winner by Great Notion in Doing Great, as well as to the six-figure earner Kelly Tough (a $250k 2YO in-training by Quality Road) and the $180k yearling Baffle ‘Em (by Quality Road).
One That Got Away is by Gormley, a grandson of A.P. Indy. So far, Blofeld is the sire of just three foals out of A.P. Indy-line mares, and all three have raced and won, including the black-type winner Johnyz From Albany and black-type placed Strong Willed. So that’s a pretty good start for this cross, and the broad cross of Quality Road and his sons with A.P. Indy-line mares has produced G1Ws Emblem Road, Dunbar Road, Bellafina, and 2023 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile-G1 winner Fierceness.
Blofeld — who is himself out of a Storm Cat dam — has had repeated success with mares carrying additional Storm Cat blood, and Gormley is out of a mare by Storm Cat’s son Bernstein. So this foal will have that going for it, too. We also appreciate the symmetry that both Quality Road and Gormley trace to mares from Allen Paulsen families: Quality Road’s dam is a Strawberry Road full-sister to Eclipse Champion Ajina, while Gormley’s second dam is out of a Strawberry Road daughter of the Eclipse Champion Estrapade.
Moving past pedigrees to the physical matchup, Blofeld is a strapping, lengthy, leggy horse with plenty of substance, so hopefully he’ll stretch out the slightly smaller One That Got Away a bit.
And then finally, as a young mare whose first cover is to a first-crop stallion, we are anxious to get One That Got Away to a proven stallion sooner rather than later, in order to get a better handle on her own abilities as a producer.
Blofeld certainly counts as a proven commodity these days, with three crops of racing age. Those three crops total 74 foals, of which he has 41 winners from 54 to race, including 4 black-type winners (5.4% to foals, 7.4% to runners) and another 6 black-type placed offspring (for a total of 13.5% black-type earners/foals, and an astronomical 18.5% black-type earners/runners – the best percentage of any stallion standing outside of Kentucky!). His average starter earns north of $77,000, and he sports a fantastic 1.43 AEI/1.13 CI ratio – meaning he’s achieving these stats without significant help from his mates. After his son Johnyz From Albany and daughter Chickieness swept the 2022 Maryland Million 2YO races, Blofeld picked up back-to-back winners of the Maryland Million Lassie when Miss Harriett scored a gutsy win in that race in ‘23 — so he’s well on his way to earning that earlier comparison to Great Notion.
And we think he’s an absolutely perfect match for One That Got Away in 2024!